In most of the world, entrepreneurs form the basis of the economy.  From mom and pop bodegas and pizza shops to technology system integrators, the next smart car, and small law firms, it is typical for startup and small business to form over 90% of a country’s economy. And, surprisingly, in innovation economies, such as the U.S., while 25-34 year olds have the highest prevalence, the majority of entrepreneurial activity comes from those over 35 years old.

If you are en entrepreneur, or thinking of becoming one, this column will provide tips to help you avoid pitfalls and point you to resources based on my 15+ years of starting companies, mentoring companies and learning from others.

China had an early rebound out of the recent great depression. This and the recession itself gave rise to an extensive global dialogue on how to get back on track: from the need to limit personal greed and implement effective oversight to the role of market interventions by governments. This response is much needed. There is a more broader question related to how we achieve a balanced and sustainable global and European growth? For that we should look beyond the current crisis.

China consistently outperforms the economic growth of US and Europe for three decades now. China has become one of the largest growth engines of the world. Although we may not beat the sheer size of China, I would like to argue that if we have the courage to adapt our European model of liberal capitalism to include some of the ‘Chinese characteristics’ we may set ourselves on a new growth path.

Thursday, July 15, 2010 12:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.
B-340 Rayburn House Office Building

A luncheon briefing presented by ASTRA, The Alliance for Science & Technology Research in America for the House R&D Caucus.
Congress continues to seek solutions to help the nation regain its lost momentum as the world’s most innovative and competi- tive country. Please join us and participate in a nonpartisan panel discussion with leading experts in business commercial- ization, small business and entrepreneurship, patent and intel- lectual property, and innovation measurement and assessment.
Topics covered will include:

• Overview: Measuring the Decline of U.S. Science Leadership & Where We are Headed (Shelton)
• Barriers to Commercialization of R&D Discovery: The University-Industry Interface — What’s Working and What’s Not (Darmody, Johnson)
• Modernizing America’s Intellectual Property System: The Importance of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) in enabling U.S. Innovation and Competitiveness (Graham)
• “MIssing in Action”: The Role Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs Should be Playing in Reviving the U.S. Innovation Economy (Bendis)

Download the PDF for more infromation or contact Robert Boege at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

These slides have served as change agents in greentech circles. By popular demand, we added a few slides to the collection.

If you attend enough cleantech events or are pitched by enough startups, you start to see the same few PowerPoint slides over and over again. Here is a collection of the best or at least the most notorious and historically significant slides in our industry.

After publishing this list last week to an overwhelming response, we heard from the original architects of some of these iconic greentech slides and we made sure to give them their overdue credit.  We also added a few additional slides that we left out during the first go-round.

The Keeling Curve.  Regardless of the flaws of An Inconvenient Truth, the movie, or those of Al Gore, the man, the movie and the man present this CO2 data in a variety of compelling ways.  The graph shows the variation in concentration of  CO2 in the atmosphere over the last fifty years based on Charles Keeling's measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Even if you don't subscribe to the theory of anthropogenic global warming, this chart is pretty stark evidence that something is happening and it's happening fast.

Imagine you’re having some big, high falutin’ meeting.  Perhaps it’s a board meeting.  Or, if you don’t have a board, perhaps it’s a management team meeting.  Or, if you don’t have a team, perhaps it’s just you talking to yourself at 3:00 a.m. in the morning.  Whatever mechanism it is you have to talk about important issues and make decisions, imagine that meeting.  Are you imagining it?  Good.

Now, imagine that same meeting with one important change:  One of your smart, savvy, customers is at the table.  And, she has an actual voice.  She’s a peer. She makes arguments, some of which are wrong and misguided, just like you and the rest of your team.  If the customer were there, I think you’d have better meetings.

Practically speaking, you probably can't actually put a customer in all your meetings.  If that’s the case, you should act as if she’s there.  Pretend like she’s sitting in the room.  In the past, I’ve actually designated an empty chair in the meeting as being where the customer is, and looking in that direction while asking “what does the customer have to say?” (yes, I’m weird).  When you’re trying to make an important decision, and you’re sort of divided on the issue, ask yourself:  If the customer were here, what would she say?  You don’t actually have to do everything she says, but it’s useful to at least factor in her point of view.

I often run across early stage companies in a real quandary about how much money to take in their first round of funding.

That is, the round just beyond the Ramen noodle eating, avoid starvation round that is usually funded out of your own pocket. The round that really gets things going once you’ve established a team and product viability.

The advice they often get – build a spreadsheet outlining fixed and variable costs over the next year or more. Estimate headcount, salaries, rent, capital equipment needs, etc. and, voila, you’ll have your number.

That’s fine, of course, but the spreadsheet should be the end result of the planning process, not the process itself. In my experience, there are certain high-level guidelines that should be used to determine how much money should be taken.

Fortune on Friday released its list of the 50 smartest people in tech. Topping the list of CEOs is Apple's Steve Jobs, while the company's lead designer, Jony Ive, took the top spot in the designer category.

Jobs is credited with bringing Apple back from the brink of disaster in the late 1990s, introducing products like the iMac and iPod. Jobs later lead the charge to change the mobile industry with the iPhone and mostly recent, the iPad.

"He is a visionary, a micromanager, and a showman who creates such anticipation around new products that their releases are veritable holidays," writes Fortune. "And Jobs is a pop culture icon like no other business executive."

Runners-up for the smartest CEO include Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Demand Media's Richard Rosenblatt.

Government stimulus spending is a contentious issue right now in Washington. But the $7.2 billion in the last stimulus package for extending high-speed Internet access is just beginning to be spent, and the beneficiaries could not be happier.

Cynthia K. Wegener and her husband, owners of a farm and horse-breeding business in western Kansas, will be able to upload a photograph of a horse to show a potential buyer in seconds, not the 20 to 30 minutes they now need with dial-up service. “I just cannot begin to tell you how frustrating it is to do anything with it,” she said.

And in remote Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in Alaska, with limited Internet access, the program will bring more fundamental changes, expanding the health care options, for example, to allow doctors in Anchorage, 400 miles to the east, to see patients via videoconference.

When a start-up launches, especially a start-up built for start-ups, it tries to anticipate the most common questions – and answer them in a FAQ. At YouTern, it seems we missed one.

The most common question we receive from companies posting internships…

“How do you define a start-up”?

Over the past few days, I’ve seen this question asked in several other places…including an interesting series of Tweets today that referred to Steve Blank’s (http://steveblank.com) definition: “A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model”.

China's focus on science and technology is relentless, and it's occurring at all levels of its society. Its labor pool is becoming increasingly sophisticated, its leadership is focused on innovation, and the country is adopting policies designed to pressure U.S. firms to transfer their technology.

The trend is causing increasing worry in Washington, but there are five reasons why China may yet succeed in its goal to achieve world dominance in technology.

1. China's leadership understands engineering

In China, eight of the nine members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, including the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, have engineering degrees; one has a degree in geology.

Anyone who has stood beside a Great Lake on a winter's day, with the cloudless sky overhead an icy blue and the wind pelting down from somewhere in Manitoba, knows the power of elemental nature. The water, the wind, the frosty sun -- this is energy, pure but untamed.

Recently, advocates of alternative forms of "green" energy have looked at this abundance of nature and seen something just as basic -- dollars, jobs, a new economy for the Midwest. If green energy is the energy of the future, and if the Midwest is so richly endowed with these elements, how can we miss?

The only problem is getting there from here. So far, we don't have the science to make this happen. We don't have the money to pay for the science. The Midwest is not exactly alone in seeing riches in the green economy, so the competition with other regions will be fierce. Private industry seems unlikely to make the huge investment necessary in an industry that may or may not pay off. Midwestern states should do it but these states, hard hit by the recession, are having trouble paying current bills and seem unlikely to make this investment in the future,

Looking for some inspiration and tips on how to make your company more conducive to innovation? Here's some food for thought and action -- Idea Champions' ten most popular postings on the subject.

HOW TO FOSTER A CULTURE OF INNOVATION

1. The Garden of Innovation

2. 50 Ways to Foster a Sustainable Culture of Innovation

3. 56 Reasons Why Most Innovation Initiatives Fail

4. Innovation: It's About Time 

5. The Paradox of Innovation

6. The Art of Seeing the Invisible

7. The 100 Lamest Excuses for Not Innovating

8. Innovation Is An Inside Job

9. Here's to the Crazy Ones!

10. The Four Currents of a Culture of Innovation

This document replaces NSF 08-583.

The composition of the institutional base of the partnerships and other program requirements underwent substantial change. This solicitation should be reviewed in its entirety as essentially all sections underwent revision. Proposers should carefully read the following sections:

* Eligibility Information
* Mandatory Letter of Intent
* Supplementary Documents
* Additional Review Criteria

Proposals not meeting the requirements of this Solicitation may be returned without review.

Please be advised that the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) includes revised guidelines to implement the mentoring provisions of the America COMPETES Act (ACA) (Pub. L. No. 110-69, Aug. 9, 2007.) As specified in the ACA, each proposal that requests funding to support postdoctoral researchers must include a description of the mentoring activities that will be provided for such individuals. Proposals that do not comply with this requirement will be returned without review (see the PAPP Guide Part I: Grant Proposal Guide Chapter II for further information about the implementation of this new requirement).

On July 3, President Obama announced that the U.S. Department of Energy offered a conditional commitment to Abengoa Solar Inc. for a $1.45 billion loan guarantee to finance the construction and start-up of a concentrating solar power (CSP) generating facility in Solana, Arizona. Once operational, the plant will add 250 megawatts (MW) of capacity to the electrical grid using parabolic trough solar collectors and will feature the first molten salt thermal energy storage system in the United States.

The plant, located 70 miles southwest of Phoenix, will use mirrors to direct sunlight onto receiver tubes that will heat the molten salt fluid to more than 700°F. The system's heat will turn steam turbines and will be capable of storing six hours of thermal energy, which will allow the plant to dispatch power during early morning and late evening utility loads. The thermal storage will also enable the plant to continue operating during intermittent cloudy weather.

Despite the hype surrounding equity capital, very few startups raise money from outside investors. The Census Bureau's most recent Survey of Business Owners shows that only 2.7 percent of U.S. companies obtained startup financing from a venture capital firm, strategic investor, friend, or family member. Even raising external equity after the startup stage is uncommon. Data from Angelsoft, a provider of angel investment tracking software, reveal that only 2.8 percent of those seeking money from angel groups receive it. The share of successful requests for venture capital is even lower. A primer on venture capital produced by the Small Business Administration estimates that only 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent of funding requests made to VC firms result in an investment.

So why do so few succeed at getting others to invest in their businesses?

I doubt that Steve Jobs has ever asked Apple customers what type of products they want, or that he cares about what they need. Jobs believed that if he developed a mobile phone that plays music and surfs the web, he could create both the want and need. He was right: his iPhone changed the industry and started a mini technology revolution.

Most of the entrepreneurs I know fancy themselves to be like Jobs.  They think they know—better than their customers—what the customers want, and what they need. Or they believe, as in the movie Field of Dreams, that if you “build it, they will come”. But it just doesn’t work this way in real life. The vast majority of technology startups fail because no one buys or uses their products.

Minnesota’s newly passed $60 million angel investment tax credit will officially debut the week of July 19. That’s when the state Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) will start accepting applications from investors and start-ups hoping to be certified for the program.

“DEED is developing and testing the back office systems which will allow us to manage the Angel Tax Credit Program,” coordinator Jeff Nelson wrote in an e-mail. “Our current expectation is that this work will be largely done by July 16^th, allowing us to launch the program during the week of July 19^th. Thanks for your patience!”

This is either a great joke a very strange coincidence.

As many soccer fans and TV news viewers know, there's an "oracle octopus" named Paul in Germany who has been winning acclaim for his ability to predict World Cup games. Well, it turns out that his full name is Paul Allen. That, of course, is also the name of Microsoft's co-founder -- who happens to own a yacht named "Octopus."

"We all got a good laugh out of it," said David Postman, a spokesman for Allen's Vulcan Inc., when we called to find out if they knew how the octopus got its name. "We’ve got no idea who named him."

Looks like the Octopus picked the World Cup winner.... Spain!

Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?” He recalls the psychologist being excited by his answers. In fact, the psychologist’s session notes indicate Schwarzrock rattled off 25 improvements, such as adding a removable ladder and springs to the wheels. That wasn’t the only time he impressed the scholars, who judged Schwarzrock to have “unusual visual perspective” and “an ability to synthesize diverse elements into meaningful products.”

The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful, and that’s what’s reflected in the tests. There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).

Top 10 Blogs and Websites for Startups and Entrepreneurship Advice

Here’s a list of the best blogs and websites I’ve come across which focus on startups and entrepreneurship. Most of these blogs have really informative articles which provide excellent advice for aspiring entrepreneurs who want to start their own company.

Top 10 Startup Blogs

Paul Graham

Paul Graham is the founder of Viaweb, Y Combinator (the most popular startup incubator which provides seed funding and advice to early stage startups) and Hacker News. His essays are some of the best articles on startups and entrepreneurship ever and should be on the reading list of every aspiring entrepreneur.